It&#39;s been covered by the Medway Broadside already in Ste- phen Morris&#39;s review of Medway Happenings 2011 (so I&#39;m not going to go on about it, but someone said back in July that the Medway music scene is dead. Well, it isn&#39;t. October 2011 has seen Medway Eyes release

a compilation album for Oxjam comprised of a whopping 47 tracks. Yes, that&#39;s right. 47. Because the Medway music scene is very much alive and kicking, thank you. There, I said I wouldn&#39;t go on about it, didn&#39;t I? Anyway, what is this ME3 album? Well, every year, Med- way Eyes celebrates its birthday with a bit of a knees up and the release of a download album for charity. This is the third one, the others being ME1 and ME2. It’s been our way of saying thank you to all the musicians who support us and work with us. This year we decided to broaden the scope and invite

people who hadn’t collaborated with us (yet) but whose music we really like. We did this partly because we didn’t want to exclude anyone just because we hadn’t actually got around to working with them, and partly as a great big two finger salute to the notion that music in Medway is any- thing other than vibrant, brilliant, thriving and healthier than ever. Of course, this meant that ME3 was a lot of fun to curate.

We first wrote to each of the contributors six weeks before the scheduled release date, wondering whether the first timers would have heard of us, or whether asking some people for a third track in three years was pushing it a bit. We needn&#39;t have worried. The response was overwhelm-

ing. Some artists gave us tracks from their albums. Some gave us outtakes or rarities. Others recorded tracks especially for the album or gave

us exclusive material. The tracks arrived in the Medway Eyes inbox one by one over a period of about a month and every one of them was hastily played as soon as we possi- bly could. We sequenced the album so that it starts with folk and

flows through funk, punk, rock, pop, retro sounds and a sort of ambient hip-hop (as I believe it is termed by the beat combos that purvey it) before finishing full circle on folk again, and we reckon it really works. You&#39;d expect a compilation to drag at over two hours in

length, but this one doesn’t, and with good reason – be- cause every last man jack of a track on it is deeply, deeply hep. Here’s what you do: You go off and download the album from Medway Eyes (www.medwayeyes.co.uk/me3.html)

and fill your head with it. On the way, please consider making a donation to Oxjam. They can save a life for the price of a sandwich.